Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

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I think that we should discern between nonfunctional and functional requirements. Right now, implementation of functional requirements can be done very fast, with the effects that you mention.

But nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, performance and security are still extremely hard to get right, because they not only need code but many correct organizational decisions to be achieved.

As customers connect these nonfunctional requirements with a brand, I don't see how big SaaS players will have a problem.

For new brands, it's as hard as ever to establish trust. Maybe coding is a bit faster due to AI, but I'm not yet convinced that vibe coders are the people on top of which you can build a resilient organization that achieves excellence in nonfunction requirements.

"As customers connect these nonfunctional requirements with a brand, I don't see how big SaaS players will have a problem."

Brand means almost nothing when a competitor can price the software at 90% cheaper. Which is what we are going to see

By that logic, Microsoft’s brand means nothing when OpenOffice is free.

Microsoft is a robust business, with corporate contracts going back 40 years. There are going to be exceptions and winners, and microsoft is probably a winner

Have you noticed how rapidly Microsoft is setting its own brands on fire? Most recently by abandoning the brand "Microsoft Office" and renaming that product to "Microsoft 365 Copilot App" instead.

I also cannot understand how they mix up their brands so much, even people working in the MS ecosystem need to learn new brands every year.

I don't think you are correct. Take for example something like workday where companies manage their HR data. It's not only about the web interface but also about the fact that all of the implemented IT processes have been checked to be legally correct for each country, that the website is resilient to hackers and has availability that covers their customer's needs. You can't copy that without building a large org such as workday.

Even on a technical level the interfaces with country-specific legacy software used all over the place are so badly documented the AI won't help you to shortcut these kind of integrations. There are not 10k stackoverflow posts about each piece of niche software to train from.

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